As traditional IT systems and data centres are moving towards cloud , there are several cloud service providers available in the market. Choosing the right service provider for your organization is a crucial decision. While taking this decision organizations are required to look at several aspects related to the need for scalability, availability, integrated governance and controls, reliability to have back-to-back SLAs and so on.

Today we look more in detail about Oracle cloud infrastructure which is a leading provider in the cloud services market and holds 9% of market share as per statistics available in 2021, learn about its features , advantages and why choose oracle cloud.

Introduction to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Oracle cloud infrastructure is a set of complementary cloud services which let you build and run a wide range of applications and services on a highly available hosted infrastructure spread globally. It offers high compute capabilities and storage capacity in a flexible overlay virtual network which is secure and robust. It gives a free trial with $300 cloud credits to be used within 30 days.

Oracle cloud infrastructure accounts have a set of resources which are free from charge for the life of the account. Free resources enable you to set up a virtual machine instance, an oracle autonomous database, networking, load balancing, storage resources to support applications you built or host . Using these resources, you can set up small scale applications and run them or use this infrastructure to test proof of concept.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Components

Oracle cloud infrastructure comprises several components. Let’s look at them in more detail as under:

• OCI regions are collection of availability domains located in a single geographic region
• Availability domains are one or more isolated, fault tolerant oracle data centres which host cloud resources like instances, volumes and subnets. A region may contain multiple or single availability domains
• Fault domains are logical grouping of hardware and infrastructure in the availability zone itself. Fault domains are used to isolate resources during hardware failure or sudden or unexpected outages in software
• Compartments are collection of related resources which can be accessed only by groups which have been allotted permissions by regional administrators
• DevOps is continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for automation of delivery and deployment of software to Oracle cloud infrastructure (OCI) computing platform

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architecture

With regions we have availability domains which are also known as ADs. ADs are fully isolated data centres within a region connected over low latency and high bandwidth networks. With ADs lies the fault domains also called FDs , act as logical data centres within an availability domain. Applications hosted on fault domains are protected from hardware failures.

Applications running across multiple availability zones having protection against physical data centre outage and applications which are running across regions having protection against regional failures. This also provides load balancing capabilities apart from fault tolerance and high availability.

In availability domains physical infrastructure such as cooling and power are not shared and neither the internal network.

Resources and compartments can be added or removed at any point of time. Resources movement from one compartment to another compartment is very flexibly designed. If an organization has done acquisition resources need to be moved. Compartments are logical segregation so multiple resources from several regions can be in one compartment. Upto six levels of nesting is possible in compartments to have sub compartments.

Features of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

• Only cloud with standard based oracle software
• Only public cloud integrating documents , analytics, social network , Big data
• Only cloud offering with Real application clusters , data guard, Exadata and Exalogic
• Flexibility to transparently move workloads between environments
• Enables rapid adoption of PaaS for Test-dev, Backup and other patterns

How to access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Oracle cloud infrastructure supports Google chrome browser 69 or later, Safari 12.1 or later and Firefox 62 or later.

To sign in to Oracle cloud at https://cloud.oracle.com you require cloud account name , username and password.

There are different ways to have an account created on:

• Paid order activation is done from welcome email in case you have ordered oracle infrastructure as a service (Oracle IaaS) and Oracle platform as a service (Oracle PaaS) cloud services with universal credits through oracle sales then you need to activate your services before using them. You need to create an account and activate the associated subscription.
• Oracle cloud infrastructure free tier sign up is valid for 30 days from the day of sign-up. For free trial your mobile number and credit card details will be requested but not used unless you upgrade the account post expiry period of free trial or before that.
• An administrator from existing oracle cloud account can create a new user account

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